"Mobile devices that adapt to who you are, reflecting what you are doing when you are doing it. This concept is at the heart of the Plasma Active user experience. Plasma Active One was released in October 2011, providing early adopters the first opportunity to experience Activities on a tablet. Since then, the design and development team behind this open source touch interface has been hard at work on an update. The fruits of their labor were released today, December 14, 2011 as Plasma Active Two."

When Plasma Active One was released, people began installing and using Plasma Active on a variety of tablet devices, resulting in valuable user feedback. Tablets were also provided to testers in controlled environments where usage was observed by the Plasma Active design team. This information about real-world usage enabled the team to improve the end-user experience significantly over the past two months.

Better Performance

In addition to tweaking presentation, the team paid attention to performance. This is important because Plasma Active is intended for smaller devices. Listing documents, applications, widgets and contacts were optimized for a more fluid experience. In some cases, they are more than 10 times faster than Plasma Active One. Several elements of the QtQuick-based interface were optimized for a much-needed performance boost. The on-screen keyboard is now more responsive, and boot times have been significantly reduced.

Introducing Recommendations

Plasma Active Two focused primarily on improvements to One. However, Plasma Active Two has one significant new feature ― Recommendations. Plasma Active is now able to learn as you use your device. It uses that information to make recommendations as to what content, web sites and applications are likely to be related to what you are doing right now.

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Correction: although I originally did not link to kde.org, I have just realised that as a good editor, Thom did. My apologies.